Monday, January 22, 2007

Archivists looking for ways to preserve digital art have gone to the depths of the earth looking for answers.

[T]he Long Now Foundation has visited the Mormon Church's genealogical archive kept buried in a vault in Utah's Cottonwood Canyon. The church is building an archive of all the world's genealogical data on microfiche in a vault designed to last at least 1,000 years. Still, the data in the vault doesn't have an internal index, according to those at the Long Now Foundation who visited the site. "The index of where things are is in an Oracle database outside the vault. And without an index for the vault, (the data) is useless," one executive said. [Link]

Useless? Lock me in there with a microfilm reader and a lifetime supply of doughnuts and I'll die a happy man.